The truly smart home may be some way off yet, but individual technologies can already do a lot. Here’s a closer look:

1 Adjust your lights

Smart lightbulbs like those made by Philips and Lifx allow users to adjust the lighting in their homes using voice control or an app. These lights can also access your phone’s GPS signal to detect when you’re on your way home and illuminate the interior as you walk in the door.

2 Restock the pantry

Amazon’s Dash buttons allow you to order items like snacks and paper towels simply by pushing a plastic button. Some gadgets take this a step further: Brita, for example, offers a water pitcher that knows when the filter is about to expire and automatically orders a fresh one online.

3 Spy on your fridge

Samsung’s wi-fi-equipped refrigerator has a camera inside (see vid below) so that you can see what items you’re out of when you’re at the grocer, for instance.

4 Change your climate

Nest’s thermostat learns about your temperature preferences over time and automatically adjusts according to factors like the time of day.

5 Watch your back

Companies like Icontrol Networks and Nest sell Internet-connected security cameras that can send alerts and record video when motion is detected in your home. Some gadgets, like the Nest Cam Outdoor, can also tell the difference between people and animals to avoid false alarms.

Basis and the other pills that will likely follow it in the next five to ten years are the fruits of a scientific backwater that has been working toward this moment for a quarter-century. These drugs and supplements are aimed to be a hack of the heretofore most intractable condition of human existence, the invisible countdown clock with which evolution has equipped our bodies. They just might postpone the onset of the most common afflictions of our dotage, from cancer to heart disease to diabetes to Alzheimer’s. We won’t necessarily enjoy longer maximum life spans (though that’s a possibility), but we very well might enjoy longer health spans, meaning the vital, productive chunk of our lives before degeneration kicks in.

Others who’d taken Basis before me had described effects including fingernail growth, hair growth, skin smoothness, crazy dreams, increased stamina, better sleep, and more energy. Once I began taking it, I did feel an almost jittery uptick in mojo for a few days, and I slept more soundly as well. Then those effects seemed to recede, and there were also mornings where I felt a little out of it. If these were placebo effects, they were weird ones, because they didn’t make me feel better, only different.

Cold hearted orb that rules the night, Removes the colours from our sight, Red is gray and yellow white, But we decide which is right. And which is an illusion?

The Moody Blues wrote those famous lyrics nearly 50 years ago and way before the term ‘Big Data” was coined. These days with all kinds of social sentiment, sensory, satellite and other data which clearly help identify red as red and yellow as yellow, we still seem to want to decide which is right and which is an illusion.

Take what happened in Florida last week. Matt Drudge, the conservative blogger questioned if the government was exaggarating the intensity of Hurricane Matthew. I live on the western coast of Florida and was not affected much by this storm, but having lived through several close calls, I was pleased to see our governor (who may be even more conservative than Matt), sound the alarms loud and clear. Over 1.5 million Floridians faced evacuation orders. But the Governor then fought pleas for extending the voter registration deadline and a court had to intervene.

That was one of the largest Florida evacuations in recent memory. One of the most impressive achievements of the National Hurricane Center is that its ‘track forecast error” has been steadily dropping over decades. The improvements in track forecasts have meant that hundreds of miles of coastline have not been evacuated and we have saved millions of dollars in emergency services. As I found out when I wrote a case study on the NHC in The New Polymath, it has to collect truly “Big Data” via satellite imagery, flights by the Hurricane Hunters, sensors on buoys in the water, dropsondes parachuted through storm clouds and other sources. It uses supercomputing power to create multiple models of likely tracks ( you see them as spaghetti tracks on your TV). It goes back at the end of each season and audits its forecasts.

And yet, we let our politics question the men and machines at the NHC. I have noticed a bothersome trend with my right leaning trends. They are suspicious of any government sourced data – they are afraid to give President Obama any credit and, in turn, potentially help Hillary Clinton’s chances.

But my liberal friends are no better. They are so convinced of the “middle class squeeze” and want more social programs that they refuse to believe Big Data from the IRS, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau that I mined for my new book, Silicon Collar. The data shows plenty of opportunity for anybody with some initiative

· if you leave out the top 5%, the rest reported $ 6 trillion in AGI or $ 8 trillion in income to the IRS

· for 3+ years, the BLS has reported at least 4 million unfilled jobs every single month

· this economy has 40+ million jobs in franchises, platforms (Apple, eBay, Uber etc.), new services (alternative health, ethnic grocers etc.) which are not being tracked very well, but providing opportunities for many at $20, 100K, eveh higher a year

Most concerning is many of my tech savvy friends who do not want to accept the century of Big Data of research for the book which shows automation only gradually erodes jobs.

Why are there still 90,000 bank branches with over half a million teller and other jobs (just in the US) even after decades of ATMs and Mobile banking? Why do we still have over 600,000 U.S. postal jobs in the face of all kinds of digital communications and when the USPS has automated in the form of kiosks and logistics tech? Why do we still have so many grocery checkout jobs in face of the UPC code/scanner patented 65 years ago and self checkout available for years now? In a world of CGI, why do today’s animated movies show more animators in their credits than Disney’s Snow White did in 1937? How slowly will autonomous cars become mainstream and taxi and truck drivers disappear in a world where half the cars sold globally last year were still manual transmission ?

Their argument – machines are evolving much faster these days so they will destroy jobs much quicker. My counter – technology may be evolving quicker, but technology adoption curves have not speeded up. If anything, my research shows our societies have “circuit-breakers to over automation”. And they go – the past is a poor indicator of the future.

But they don’t have the data. And yet, they want me to be a believer in their lack of Big Data. They want me call their red gray and their yellow white.

Rather than wait to check in, they'll wear a radio frequency badge to track their movements, allowing staffers to come to them as they wander to a sitting area or snack bar. During surgery, family members can check status boards to see when a procedure is underway and when the patient moves to a private recovery room. Often, patients meet with their surgeon via videoconferencing before discharge. "The whole place is focused on not being sick, but on getting better," says Brett Simon, an anesthesiologist and the center's director.

Josie Robertson is one of a slew of state-of-the-art ambulatory centers being opened by health systems to reduce costs and hospitalizations while also drumming up business. The aim is "a high-end patient experience," says Rudolph P. Valentini, chief medical officer at Children's Hospital of Michigan, of the striking new pediatric center in Troy that opened in February. These centers are all equipped to handle an emergency, and patients can quickly be moved to the inpatient hospital if necessary.

Though she’ll continue to work on the foundation, she’s building up a personal office to dedicate resources and attention to an issue of central personal importance: getting more women into tech — and helping them stay there.

It’s personal. Gates got her start in tech. After graduating from Duke with a computer science degree (and an MBA), she spent a decade working at Microsoft. That was back in 1987, when just over a third of undergraduate computer science degrees went to women. Nearly 30 years later, fewer than one in five CS degrees are earned by women. That, according to Gates, constitutes a crisis. “This has got to change,” she told me when we met to discuss her efforts last week.

“Co-founded by Alex Garden, the former president of Zynga Studios, and Julia Collins, who comes from a restaurant background,Zume Pizza employs a mix of robots and humans to prepare and bake its pies.

“We have what we call a co-bot environment, so humans and robots working collaboratively,” says Collins. “Robots do everything from dispensing sauce, to spreading sauce, to placing pizzas in the oven.

Each pie is baked in the delivery van, which means “you get something that is pizzeria fresh, hot and sizzling,” says Garden. It’s an important detail; as cool — and cost-saving — as Zume’s robots are, taste matters most.”

This workhorse of commercial aviation accounts for one of every three commercial flights, and there are around 2,000 of them in the air at any given time.

Every one of those planes rolled out of Boeing’s Renton Production Facility, where workers build a 737 in just nine days. The factory, near Seattle, pump them out at the rate of 42 per month, and Boeing claims the 1.1-million-square-foot facility is most efficient airplane factory in the world.

"We once again relied on a combination of staff reviews and selections, and comments from outside experts and analysts, to narrow the list from the many entries we received to the 10 winners. Special thanks go to the following experts for sharing their insights on the 2016 entries: Josh Bersin, principal at Bersin by Deloitte, Deloitte Consulting LLP; Gerry Crispin, principal and co-founder of CareerXroads; Bill Kutik, HRE's HR Technology Columnist; Kyle Lagunas, research manager for talent acquisition and staffing at International Data Corp.; George LaRocque, principal analyst and founder of #HRWINS; Holger Mueller, vice president and principal analyst for Constellation Research; Elaine Orler, CEO and founder of Talent Function; and Brian Sommer, CEO of TechVentive."

One of the products is the Deloitte CulturePath which allows enterprises to assess their organization's culture

Silicon Collar looks at machines and humans at work in over 50 settings across industries and countries. On this blog I will excerpt many of those settings over the next few weeks. On Deal Architect I will excerpt more of the policy parts of the book

Elsewhere in Manhattan, Julie Bauer has been at the forefront of another profession which has embraced digital change, somewhat more than accounting. Bauer is cofounder of the digital advertising agency, Grok. She cut her teeth at large agencies like Ogilvy & Mather and Saatchi & Saatchi, but is a geek at heart. She holds on to her Commodore 64, the 8-bit home computer that she helped launch in 1982. She calls the “1984” Apple commercial the most memorable one she has seen in her long career: “One commercial and one airing changed everything.” About her ﬁ rm’s name, she says, “Grok is a term that only scientists, engineers, and sci-ﬁ freaks use, but we love the word and what it stands for.

“But you can tell the difference. See how much TV today is low-production-value reality TV. It’s dirt cheap to produce. Then you see something like House of Cards come along and people ﬂock to it because people appreciate the production value. I think there’s a balance. There’s a time and place for everything. You would hate to see the artistry of true creative talent go unappreciated in the future. Think of the latest episode of Star Wars. Without J.J. Abrams having some kind of a vision on how to make that story, tell that story, it could have been an awful movie. Now, granted, he’s got a lot more machines at his disposal and he’s got a lot more ways of producing stuff, but that vision and that creativity will hopefully never go away.”

“We also have to accept that business models have changed dramatically. Clients don’t want to pay for usage. A photographer can’t go to my client and say I want you to spend $50,000 or $100,000 to do a shoot but you can’t put it on your website. In the past, photographers made all their money on royalty. Today you can’t stop where the images are used. If I shoot a commercial for them, they will want to put the video on their website and they will want to have it on YouTube. There’s no way they want to pay talent usage fees. They buy the images outright, and that’s just a totally different mentality where people need to rethink the way they make money. At the end of the day what technology is doing is forcing our industry to rethink its business model.”